“Scouts say they’re holed up here.” Dradge’s friend pointed to a spot on the large map he struggled to keep spread across his lap.
Dradge nodded, shoveling spoonfuls of that borderline inedible soldier’s ration mash into his mouth. It was the man’s second bowl. That boded well for future marital fidelity; despite her mother’s best efforts, she never had been a good cook.
The three of them were seated in the grass surrounding a campfire outside her and Dradge’s tent. A chill had settled across the clearing with the night, and Lyara was snuggled in that crimson cloak King Hilderic had given her husband a week and a half before. It was thicker than the typical soldier-issued uniform, and had a soft fur lining.
The camp bustled with energy at all hours, but she came to appreciate it in a special way once darkness fell. Now, she could blend into the shadows and watch the world pass by, simply appreciating it for what it was.
Sketching had lost its appeal, so for the past hour she’d pretended at reading as constant distractions stole her attention. She felt alive, in a way Edras life had never permitted her to be. The sensible part of her called for restraint while her heart longed to run head-long into whatever came next.
Would Dradge let her follow him to the battle ground, or was this as far as the camp women were allowed to go? It did strike her that few other men brought their wives along at all.
“What about this pass? Fox Run?” Dradge jabbed at a spot on the map with the back of his spoon. “It’s a bottleneck.”
His friend narrowed his grey eyes at him and brushed some crumbs of mash off the parchment. “Against foot soldiers I’d give you decent odds of holding it, but not against these beasts. Cornered animals always fight harder, and those things fight hard enough as it is.”
Lyara glanced up from her book—Commander Faldore’s On Military Strategy—and tried to orient herself on the upside down map. “What if you chased them in, then sent archers to finish the job?”
Dradge’s friend glanced up at her, holding her gaze with such intention—as though he hadn’t bothered to notice her until that moment. “Ah,” he said. “You’re the wife.”
She snorted. “Yes, that’s my name. ‘The wife.’”
Shouldn’t be that hard to remember her name, it was simple enough. And this man was the one who’d come looking for Dradge those many months ago when they’d met outside her parent’s house. She swore she’d seen him again at their whirlwind of a wedding ceremony. But Dradge had a lot of friends, most of whom got quite loud quite quickly when drunk.
Dradge grinned and motioned for her to take a seat beside him. Lyara gladly climbed to her feet to sink to the ground, leaning against his side.
“Seren,” Dradge said, pointing to his friend, then wrapped that arm around her shoulders. “Pretty sure I introduced you two at the wedding. But, the perpetual scholar here finds no need to remember a name unless the person’s been dead three hundred years and he just read about them in a book.”
Seren sneered at him. “Maybe I’m still thinking of that one girl you always went on about…”
Dradge laughed and patted Lyara’s knee with his other hand. “That’s this one!”
“Oh.” Seren studied her face again, more sincerely. “L…Leirah?”
“Lyara.”
“Lyara,” Seren repeated with a nod, turning back to the map. “Archers are useless, takes a dozen arrows to drop one centaur when we’re lucky enough to hit them. We’ve tried different poisons but even then they die too slowly.” He tapped his finger on a patch of trees beside the river. “We’d have better chances controlling the terrain. A Fidelis could swamp—”
“A Fidelis?” Lyara’s heart leapt in her chest and she looked over her shoulder at the camp. “They’re here?”
“Should be by tomorrow,” Dradge said with a grunt. “Assuming they listen to a damn thing I say. I’ve asked for them on the last thirteen campaigns I’ve led and this is the first one they’ve agreed to show up at.”
“They will come,” Seren said, still surveying the map. “Deploy two, here, and—”
Lyara chuckled. “They aren’t soldiers. The Elaedoni is not a weapon.”
Both men looked at her with a similar confusion.
“Have you tried to learn what they believe, or did you find what looked like a sharp stick and simply point it at what you wanted it to poke?”
Dradge shrugged, but Seren weighed her through narrowed eyes.
“The rivers ran red, but not with our blood,” he said, quoting Randre’s Account of the New World. “We grinned all the while, promising to paint the sky as well, need be. That’s what one of the founding Fidelis houses wrote about—”
Lyara lifted her chin. “Peace is what we crossed the oceans looking for,” she said, quoting another passage from the same text. “If we were stronger, or kinder, or wiser—Essence have mercy—we would have found it.”
A smile sprang into Seren’s eyes, and he shrugged as well. “Point made. But, traditions change. These centaurs are slaughtering villages—women, children—they have no concept of mercy. Surely they would kill all of us, given the chance. It seems to me that peace demands we defend ourselves. Or would you prefer to lie down and die quietly?”
It was Lyara’s turn to shrug.
Dradge heaved a sigh. “I think I’ll regret re-introducing the two of you. Just tell me, where am I leading the main wave? I want to catch some sleep tonight.”